The poems also set a high value on personal honor. The outrage done Menelaus by Paris, who violated the most sacred laws of hospitality by carrying away his host’s wife, was the whole cause of the Trojan War. To avenge this outrage all the princes of the Achaeans rallied as if the wrong suffered had been their own. Agamemnon’s high-handed act in taking the captive Briseis from Achilles roused that wrath which is the first word of the Iliad. The Odyssey is the epic of a personal will which, triumphing over all disasters, finally wreaked a terrible vengeance on the insolent suitors who had wooed Odysseus’ wife, devoured his substance, plotted against his son, and at the end shamefully insulted Odysseus himself. The punishment of the suitors is the victory of justice over lawlessness, and possesses a moral significance which was not lost on antiquity.
In what I have just been saying I have already implied that man’s relation to the gods was not ethical but ritualistic. We must remember that when we speak of “sin” or a “consciousness of guilt,” we are presupposing a self-conscious and self-searching individual. This the Homeric man was not; on the contrary he was in the highest degree natural, unreflective, and unconscious of self. In fact the Homeric concept of sin touches our moral ideas at hardly more than three points. Disregard for an oath, failure to honor one’s father and mother, and disrespect for the stranger and suppliant were high offenses against heaven and brought down divine wrath on the transgressor. But in general sin is failure to recognize man’s absolute dependence on the immortals, to give them due honor, to pay them proper sacrifice, and to walk humbly on the earth. Sacrifice is tribute whereby man acquires merit with divinity; of such meritorious credit the priest Chryses reminds Apollo in his prayer at the beginning of the Iliad:[42] “Hear me, Lord of the silver bow, ... if ever I have roofed over a temple pleasing to thee, or if ever I have burnt in thy honor fat thighs of bulls or of goats, then accomplish this my prayer.” Agamemnon in the stress of battle reproaches Zeus for bringing his present disaster upon him in spite of the fact that he made sacrifice on every altar as he hurried to Ilion;[43] and many other illustrations might be cited. Failure to make due offering might bring serious disaster. Menelaus, on his way home from Troy, omitted sacrifice before leaving Egypt; so he was forced to return from the island of Pharos and repair his failure, after which he accomplished his voyage easily.[44] When Oeneus neglected Artemis, she sent the Calydonian boar to afflict his land: “Artemis of the golden throne sent a plague upon them, angry that Oeneus did not offer her the first fruits of his rich land. All the other gods had their feast of hecatombs, and only to the daughter of mighty Zeus did he fail to make offering, whether he forgot or had no thought of the matter. But he showed great folly in his soul.”[45] Again the plague sent by Apollo on the Achaean host before Troy suggests to Achilles that the god may be angered at a failure to perform some vow or to offer a hecatomb.[46] It is little wonder that the enlightened Plato felt horror and disgust at such notions as these and that he condemned this kind of worship as an “art of trafficking” (ἐμπορικὴ τέχνη).[47] Still this Homeric idea of the relations between men and gods—an idea which has not wholly disappeared from the world today—rests on the notion that gods and men belong to one common society in which the obligations are binding on both sides.
Especially to be avoided was insolent pride; man must not boast himself overmuch; there were fixed bounds set for him which he might not transgress. So Ajax met his fate because of his insolent defiance: “Even so he had escaped his doom, hateful though he was to Athena, if he had not let fall an insolent speech and committed great folly. He said that in spite of the gods he had escaped the great gulf of the sea; but Poseidon heard his loud boasting. Straightway then he took his trident in his mighty hands and struck the Gyraean rock and cleft it in twain. Part remained in its place, but a portion fell in the deep, that part on which Ajax first sat and uttered his great folly; but it now bore him down beneath the vast billowy sea.”[48] But Achilles showed the approved attitude of mind when he thus addressed the dead Hector: “Lie now dead; but my doom I will accept whenever it please Zeus and the other immortal gods to send it.”[49] This fear of punishment from heaven, of that which Aeschylus and Herodotus call “the envy of the gods,” long operated to keep in check excess of speech and added no doubt to the comfort of Greek society. Of magic whereby man can compel the gods there is nothing in Homer; the inferiority of mortals to the immortals is complete.
We may now properly consider the Homeric view of life after death. The epic psychology made no sharp distinction between the soul and the body; on the whole the body was identified with the self rather than the soul (ψυχή), which goes to the realm of Hades when the man is dead. There in the world of shadows beneath the earth or far out by the stream of Oceanus the shades, pale images of the men who were, exist; they do not live. The pathetic plaints of the shades that come up to Odysseus in the eleventh book of the Odyssey show how hopeless is their lot. Though Orion pursue the wild beasts over the cheerless plains of asphodel and Minos hold his golden staff and sit in judgment over the dead, yet all is insubstantial and far less than life. The often quoted words of Achilles’ shade sum up the whole matter: “Speak not to me of death, glorious Odysseus. For so I might be on earth, I would rather be the servant of another, of a poor man who had little substance, than to be lord over all the dead.”[50]
There is no system of future punishment or rewards, although a few individuals have won supreme suffering like Tityus, Sisyphus, and Tantalus or gained high station like Minos, the judge. Therefore beyond the grave there was for the Homeric man no hope, no satisfaction. Only here under the light of the sun and in the glory of action could the epic hero find his joy. This is, in no small measure, the cause of that pathos which strikes us occasionally in the poems. Man is spoken of as the most pitiful of creatures, the feeblest of all beings which the earth nourishes. Evil and suffering sent by the gods are his lot, unrelieved by any prospect of the future.[51]
Let us now summarize briefly the matter we have thus far been considering together. As I said at the beginning of this lecture, religion in the Homeric poems shows the influence of the conditions under which the poems were composed. Intended for Ionian princes of Asia Minor, emigrants who had lost the support which local attachment always gives, the Iliad and Odyssey present those traits of religion which were everywhere understood and which made a universal appeal. Therefore the Homeric gods have a synthetic character; they are, as has been aptly said, “composite photographs” of local Zeus’s, Apollos, Athenas, and so on. Again since the epics were intended for entertainment, the gods are represented not as remote, but human and real; they have characters and personalities which local divinities did not possess. In picturing them as more human, in rehearsing their quarrels, intrigues, passions, and even physical peculiarities, the poet not only amused his carefree audience, but brought the gods closer to men; he made them more comfortable creatures to live with, even if they were moved by whims and fancies. Their worship was sacrifice associated with the banquet which men and gods shared in common fellowship; the gods were thought to wish man’s offerings and service just as man desired communion with them. Malevolent divinities, daemons of the earth, rites of riddance by which man seeks to avert the wrath of some spiteful or angry being, all the great mass of practices unquestionably common to the folk-religion of the age, were for the most part omitted by the poet as unsuited or uninteresting to his aristocratic audience. There is almost nothing bearing on the cult of the dead save possibly in connection with the funeral of Patroclus; incantation proper is mentioned only once; and Circe’s potent herbs by which she transformed Odysseus’s companions into beasts, like Circe herself, belong to fairyland. The Homeric religion, therefore, is largely a social religion of this world, of sunlight and of action.
Yet if Homer’s gods are human, they are still impressive; they have the dignity which comes from unchanging age and superhuman power; they are conceived in the grand way. So true was this that as the Homeric poems became popular literature, studied in school and known to all men, they created a universal religion. They also influenced the types under which the Greek artists represented their great gods. Tradition says that when Phidias was asked by his associate Panaenus what type he had selected for his Zeus at Olympia, he replied with Homer’s lines: “The son of Cronos spoke and nodded under his dark brows; and the ambrosial locks of the king fell down from his immortal head, and he shook great Olympus.”[52] Such was the effect of this statue after it had stood for five centuries and a half that the orator Dio Chrysostom said of it: “Whoever among mankind is wholly weary in soul, whoever has experienced many misfortunes and sorrows in life, and may not find sweet sleep, he, methinks, if he stood before this statue, would forget all the calamities and griefs that come in the life of man.”[53]
We must, however, recognize that the spiritual contribution of the Homeric poems to later Greece was inevitably less than the artistic. No inspired bard was needed to teach the lessons of man’s inferiority to the gods and of his dependence on them, although these are constantly emphasized; yet the epics also inculcate the necessity of moderation in act and speech; and they teach that Zeus is the guardian of oaths and of hospitality. Furthermore they express the half-realized belief that Zeus is the protector of all justice; and they bring home the fact that the individual must pay for his sin, however he may have been led into it. But the greatest contribution which the poems made to later religious thought was paradoxically due to the fact that they made their gods so thoroughly human, for it inevitably followed in due season that the gods were measured by the same standards of right and wrong that were applied to men. This eventually ennobled man’s concept of divinity, so that he required of the gods a perfection to match their immortal nature.
Herodotus names Homer and Hesiod together as the great theological teachers of Greece. But when we compare the later poet with the earlier we find a marked contrast between them. Homer looks backward to an earlier day; his poems reflect the glory of that splendid age when the Achaean princes, like Agamemnon in golden Mycenae, ruled at home in power, or on the plains of Troy contended with divine and human foes. Homer is aristocratic, universal, objective, with little self-consciousness, hardly concerned with the origins of gods and men or with the possible goals toward which the world was moving. Hesiod was the son of a farmer, who according to tradition had come from Cyme in Asia Minor to Boeotian Ascra which lay on a spur of the range of Helicon near a shrine of the Muses. When Hesiod wrote, the land had felt the exhaustion of war, the coming of ruder tribes from the north and west had swamped the earlier civilization, and both noble and peasant were finding life harder. These conditions are reflected in the Hesiodic poetry: it deals with fact rather than fancy; for the splendid dramatic deeds of men and gods it substitutes homely adage, reasoned reflection, and moral tale. Hesiod is self-conscious and reflective. He uses the first person, whereas Homer never names himself. A dour son of the soil, born in gloomy days, he is the first writer of Europe to speak for the common man.
The two chief poems which bear the name of Hesiod are the Theogony and the Works and Days. The former deals with the origin of the world and the generations of the gods. It is an attempt to bring order into current myths by sifting and arranging them into a system. The material Hesiod found ready to his hand; his task was to systematize and set it forth to his audience. The Theogony is the first extant work of European literature to present the idea that dynasties of the gods have succeeded each other in time, the rule of Uranus giving way to the sway of Cronos, who in his turn was displaced by Zeus. We have seen that Homer did not concern himself about such matters as these; that only vague references to such ideas are found in the Iliad and Odyssey. Hesiod, however, represents another age and another aspect of the Greek mind, a desire to bring harmony into the varied and inconsistent tales of current mythology and thus in a way to render the gods intelligible to men.